Kennedy Space Centre: March 7, 2009 - IR Summary/NYT - A new spacecraft named Kepler after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, $600 million mission,  built to find out other Earth like planets, was shot into space on Friday from the Kennedy Space Center on top of a Delta 2 rocket at 10:49 p.m., which shall stay in the space for three and a half years, orbiting around the Sun to count planets by looking for different tiny blips in starlight caused by planets eclipsing their suns.

Johannes Kepler had discovered the planetary laws of motion.   Kepler will stare at a patch of the Milky Way in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, recording the brightness of 100,000 different stars every half-hour. It is equipped with the largest digital camera ever flown in space.

The goal is to accomplish the first rigorous census of planets and determine how rare or common Earth-like planets really are. Astronomers associated with Kepler estimate that they could find dozens of such planets in so-called habitable zones suitable for life as we know it, but that it would take about four years to establish their presence. The answer should pave the way for future efforts to study and collect images of terrestrial planets and to search for signs of life.

"Are there other worlds or are we alone?" asked William Borucki, of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, the chief Kepler scientist. "We could get that answer."

Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said in a news conference a few weeks before the launch, "Kepler will answer a profound and fundamental question about our place in the universe." More